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Design First

Scott was asked where people go wrong when they take on a project of this scale. His answer: “the number one most important thing is to buy good design.”

His reasoning is plain. You are going to spend a lot of money either way. Spending it on good design produces something special, and spending it on poor design produces something mediocre. The overall cost of the two is not tremendously different, but the end result is. In his words, “it all starts with good design.”

We will not repeat the cost breakdown here; that lives in our cost guide. This piece is about the other half of the idea, which is what good design actually involves and what it asks of you.

Cardello describes his process as unhurried on purpose. He tells clients to follow his lead and take their time, because it pays off if the project slows down at the start. The conversation is not about square footage. It is about how you live now, and how the house could be special for you and your family ten, fifteen, twenty years from now.

Those conversations become a bubble diagram of the program, a rough map of what the house must do and how the rooms relate. Then the site options are woven in. Cardello says the design then “becomes a little bit like sculpture.”

That last step is the one clients tend to underestimate. Once the program and the site are working together, the form stops being a container for rooms and starts being a decision about the whole building.

The details Cardello gave are specific, and each one is a design answer to a real constraint.

On a Darien waterfront house, the round tower exists because the sea wall wraps that corner of the lot, at a spot with a panoramic view of Long Island Sound. Darien has restrictive height requirements, so he used an eyebrow dormer on the upper floor to place the roofline where he wanted it. The project needed multiple variances and a trip to planning and zoning.

Inside, a staircase can do more than connect floors. Cardello treats stairs as a chance for a sculptural element. Move a stair out of the center of a house and onto an outside wall, and the floor plan opens up. He also drew a stair with seven-and-a-quarter-inch risers and a wide tread, instead of the eight-and-a-quarter-inch risers the code allows, because the first is much more comfortable to climb. Giving the details that time is, in his opinion, what leads to a successful project.

A design is a set of promises that a builder then has to keep, which is why the architect and builder relationship matters as much as the drawings.

Scott described the sequence: Cardello conceives the building and develops the idea, Scott comes in early to say roughly what it costs, the drawing continues, and then a real number is put to it before anyone builds. They check the price as the design grows, so that by the time the house is ready to build, there is a good sense of what it will be.

Coordination is where good design shows up as speed. When an architect’s plans are well coordinated, Scott said, the contractor moves faster and makes fewer mistakes. In contemporary work there is little room for error, and a half-inch error can cause a hundred thousand dollars of rework. Cardello added that a new house is fairly predictable to draw and detail if there is time to do it right, and that the mistakes he sees come from people who try to cut corners or turn a six-month project into a three-month one.

Cardello called the owner, architect, and builder together a “three-legged stool.” How you reach that stool varies. He described the traditional route, where the architect designs and the work is bid to builders, and a more recent shift in which owners come to a builder who recommends an architect. Both start from the same place: the design is the first decision, and the relationship around it is what carries the project.

To see how we work with architects from the first conversation, read How We Work, meet the people we work alongside, or look through our work.